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Apr 9, 2007

Mother tongue education day

Liberty Times also has several articles on mother tongue education day and how it's working. The idea is that on one day a week、kids use a mother language (Holo Taiwanese、Hakka、or an aboriginal language) for all classes that day.

The goal is to give the kids more of a chance to practice than half an hour a day for twice a week (the way elementary school does it now) and to extend the education through high school. It also aims to introduce this chance without adding a lot of homework、which you would get if you added another class.

The articles discuss both some of the progress and some of the problems that occur. As you can imagine、considering Taiwan's diverse lingusitic situation and the length of time these languages were supressed、it's not always easy to get qualified teachers and divide students into the appropriate groups.

Obviously、aboriginal communities have an especially big problem promoting the use of their tongue in a classroom for the whole day.

1 comment:

Michael Turton said...

Dude, I finally got fed up and sent an email to the editor at FT.com today about Hille's problems and biases. I've been reluctant to do anything, since it's really great that they even have someone here.

One of these days we have to have a beer together.

Michael